Friday, 25 May 2012

Republican House Speaker John Boehner and GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney have, in the course of the past week, pushed starkly different approaches to fiscal policy and economic recovery, a window into a broader rift within the GOP between the Tea Party and less absolutist conservatives.

Boehner, carrying the Tea Party line on spending, recently said that he would insist that the deficit be cut by a dollar for every dollar increase in the debt limit, or else he would refuse to raise it, helping drive the country toward default.

"When the time comes, I will again insist on my simple principle of cuts and reforms greater than the debt limit increase," Boehner said.

Romney, however, said that pushing drastic spending cuts during shaky economic times is a prescription for "recession or depression."

Asked by Time's Mark Halperin Wednesday why he wouldn't push major cuts in his first year, Romney responded with reasoning that would be largely uncontroversial if not for the past two years' mainstreaming of an economic philosophy that insists government spending actually costs jobs, rather than creates job.

"Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5 percent. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I'm not going to do that, of course," Romney said in an answer picked up by former bank regulator William Black.

While Zuckerberg is tucked away in his office (or somewhere on Facebook's campus) coding and developing Facebook's products, Fragodt makes sure the rest of his life runs smoothly. That's a big responsibility — managing one of the most important CEOs and entrepreneurs in history.

So, who is Fragodt?

She's been an assistant and coordinator for a long time.

According to her LinkedIn profile, she's been doing this since 1987. (Yes, that's around the time that Zuckerberg was finally getting out of diapers.)

Fragodt joined Facebook in 2006, around the time that Facebook had 6 million users. She's been Zuckerberg's assistant for about six years, according to her profile.

She's a native San Francisco resident, where she was born, and a fan of Girl Talk according to her Facebook profile. (She's also friends with Jim Breyer, an early Facebook investor, on Facebook.)

She's served as a legal assistant and she says on her profile that she's proficient in legal and financial reporting.

One of her LinkedIn recommendations from an earlier job describes her as "a rock that multi-tasks like a dynamo but she can always be counted on to be there when you need her."

Another Facebook employee said she's "highly knowledgeable, professional and helpful. She's a great person to work with."

She appears to be very passionate about her job—she's very prolific on Quora, a question-and-answer site.

She says on Quora that the executive assistant role demands a "jack of all trades type," which is what she seems to be like. Here are some of her responsibilities at Facebook:

Review, update and manage Mark Zuckerberg's schedule and managing the agenda and logistics of all weekly and monthly global meetings.

Communicating with customers, prospects, partners and vendors on a daily basis.

It's hard to overstate how big a disaster the Facebook IPO has been for NASDAQ, one of the United States' two big stock exchanges.

People often forget that the NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) are private companies, just like the companies that list on them. As such, the exchanges compete fiercely for "clients"—which in this case are public companies looking for a place to list their stocks.

15 years ago, in the 1990s, the relative positioning of NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange were clear:

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was the exchange for big, boring, prestigious industrial companies.

NASDAQ was the exchange for exciting, disruptive technology companies.

Over the past decade, however, the New York Stock Exchange has revitalized itself and begun to make serious inroads into NASDAQ's core franchise: The high-tech, innovative companies that in the 1990s would have automatically listed on NASDAQ.

In recent years, for example, the NYSE has won hot tech companies like LinkedIn and Pandora. NASDAQ has also won its share of tech clients, including Groupon. But now, with each new tech company, it's a fair fight between the exchanges, whereas they once all went to NASDAQ.

The battle for the Facebook listing, not surprisingly, was intense. For NASDAQ, especially, winning was critical, because if NASDAQ had lost Facebook, its positioning as the "home for innovative tech companies" would really have begun to slip.

Ultimately, for reasons that have yet to be disclosed, NASDAQ won.

But what should have been a crowning achievement for the exchange has now become what one tech insider describes as a "complete cosmic catastrophe."

Instead of getting credit for listing Facebook, NASDAQ blew the whole first day of trading. And its reputation in the tech community may have suffered irreparable harm.

Worse, one tech industry insider furious about NASDAQ's handling of the Facebook IPO tells us that no tech executive who understands what happened with Facebook will ever list on NASDAQ again.

The source doesn't buy NASDAQ's explanation for the problems—that the exchange's systems just glitched for the first half-hour. Rather, the source says, the entire day was a "rolling train wreck."

Perhaps most importantly, the industry insider says that senior tech executives and bankers believe that Facebook's stock collapse after the IPO may have been almost entirely due to the NASDAQ screwup.

Why?

Because the failure of NASDAQ's systems caused enormous confusion about who did and didn't own stock, along with how much they owned and at what price. As these problems continued throughout the day, the source says, many investors just gave up trying to figure out what was happening and retreated to the sidelines. And their disappearance from the market, the insider thinks, exacerbated the stock decline.

Now, we're obviously still in the middle of the Facebook blame game, and as the world moves on, the intensity of the frustration with NASDAQ will presumably fade. And NASDAQ is still the home of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and other tech giants.

But if NASDAQ wants to win the future tech-industry listings that will be crucial to its maintaining its positioning as the exchange of the future, it is likely going to have to come up with a much more complete explanation for what happened last week—and why it will never happen again.

In the meantime, the advantage in this exchange duopoly has now firmly shifted to the NYSE.